


perhaps, perhaps, perhaps

by binoculars



Category: Bottom (UK)
Genre: Alcohol Abuse/Alcoholism, Canon-Typical Violence, Homophobia, Internalized Homophobia, M/M, Pet Names, Transphobia, canon typical alcohol abuse?, man these tags are off to a good start, none of the three characters in this fic really have good things to say about gay people
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-08-14
Updated: 2019-08-14
Packaged: 2020-09-01 00:29:27
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,922
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20249158
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/binoculars/pseuds/binoculars
Summary: eddie starts up with pet names, and it goes downhill from there





	perhaps, perhaps, perhaps

**Author's Note:**

> this fic isn't really gross enough to be in-character, but as a man who unironically enjoys frasier, this was the best i could do

Richie wasn’t sure of the day the first time it happened, because he didn’t keep a habit of knowing the date on principle. However, the second time it happened, he checked the newspaper to make sure he hadn’t time-traveled or universe-hopped to a thread in the fabric of reality where he and Eddie were married (and married for real, not by accident).

The first time, Richie had just relocated Eddie’s bar to the plaster on the now-considerably-more-bumpy ceiling.

“Love, s’not like I’m asking for a ram-up of heroin,” wheedled Eddie, slightly cross-eyed and completely walloped on the floor.

“You may as well be,” retorted Richie. “I don’t know how your liver shares a body with you. Hang on.”

“To what?”

“What did you just say?”

Eddie furrowed his brow. “When?”

“Just now, idiot,” snapped Richie, who was hoping he had hallucinated the pet name as well as the funny little flip his stomach had done.

“When.”

“Just now—oh, before that, you mongrel.”

“To what?” Eddie asked the ceiling.

“What?”

“You never told me,” he mused.

“Christ, you’re pissed,” Richie muttered to the stain on the table. Maybe enough loose threads had come unraveled that day that he could leave this one alone. Eddie’s head thumped quietly on the floorboards as he shifted out of a puddle.

“Are those ceiling lumps new?”

The second time, November eleventh, Eddie had been much more legible and the whole thing had been uncomfortably domestic.

“Darling, what’ve you done with my shoes?” came the shout from the entryway. Richie almost dropped what remained of their wooden spoon into dinner.

“What was that, Eddie?” he shouted back.

Eddie slammed the door open. “I asked if you knew why I got kicked out of the grocer’s.” He was puffed up enough to almost fill the doorway.

“Couldn’t imagine, Eddie, but I actually wanted to know if you’d—” Richie didn’t get the chance to clear up the obvious misunderstanding of their relationship because there was a fist in his mouth.

By November fifteenth, it was really getting out of hand. Eddie was digging around the kitchen with enough vigor to stir Richie into a somewhat territorial state, so Richie was already trying to keep his limbs from twitching too noticeably when it happened again.

“Dearest, shall I pop off and buy you some flours?”

Richie’s heart fairly melted. “Oh, if you must—.” He bolted upright. “What?” he bellowed. “What?” he bellowed again.

“Have you been having trouble hearing lately? I said, ‘Would you like any flours?’”

“Right, Eddie, I can’t live with you any more, you’re moving out.”

“Am I?”

“Yes, pack your bags, go on now,” flapped Richie.

“What’s this for?”

Richie tittered. “Well, for starters, if any birds see me hanging around any, haha,” he dropped his voice glanced around like he was confessing to an Oedipus complex, “any _home-of-shedules_, they’ll think I’m also, nnn, you know!”

“Sweetheart, what the hell’s a home-of-schedule?”

“There! There! You did it again!” Richie pointed like he was indicating a murderer in court.

“Maybe you’d be making more sense with a couple of drinks,” Eddie said, moving toward the cabinet.

“Aah, don’t you try it! I know all about you and your little,” Richie twiddled his fingers maniacally, “_date-rape_ _drugs_, so you can have a piece of my young, defenseless bottom!” He gasped. “You haven’t gotten me already, have you? Blast!” Richie cursed and grabbed at himself theatrically.

“Maybe you’d make more sense if I were at the pub,” Eddie told the air.

“Oh, dear, it’s only nine in the morning and you’ve been going awfully hard at it lately,” Richie rambled. “What am I saying? You’re trying to assault me! Go on, then, slither back to your cesspool of lechery with your weirdo friends, see if I care.”

Eddie paused, coat in hand. He squinted into mid-distance.

“When you said hummus-cetera, did you mean queer?” he asked loudly.

Richie made a shushing motion like he was trying to perform CPR on two hummingbirds at once.

“Because unless I blacked out for longer than you told me last week, there shouldn’t be any gays living here.”

Richie motioned like he was furiously pushing two alligators back into a swamp.

“Aside from you, of course, but then you never get any, so I doubt it’s contagious.”

Richie swished about like a conductor silencing an army of orchestras. “And what do you mean by that, bastard?” he yelled when he got his tongue back in line.

“I mean, why are you worried about getting drugged by a homosexual if you don’t know any others?”

Richie paused. He started and stopped a sentence a few times.

“I’m _not__—_Hang on, you aren’t…? Then what were all the pet names about?”

“What pet names?”

Richie’s heart sank a worrying amount. “You know, baby, sweetheart, sugar….”

“Yes?” Eddie grinned.

“Oh, shut up, you know what I meant.” Richie flounced over and sat, with no small melodrama, on the love-seat.

“Oh, no I didn’t, darling, sweetcheeks, lovely,” Eddie gloated harder. Richie began to be glad he was sitting down, then closed off that part of his brain for renovation.

“Just shut up, Eddie, shut up. And anyway, why? Don’t tell me this was some bet with your _friends_ to get me to call you ‘sweetheart.’”

Eddie’s grin slid off to a corner to wait until the liquor cabinet was restocked. He threw his hat back on the floor. “Do you really think I’d play with your feelings like that? Is that how much faith you have in me?”

“Yes, honestly.”

“Probably wise, but not this time, you ungrateful ass.” Eddie slumped down at the table. “I try to make you happy just once—”

“And just this once,” Richie muttered.

“—and now I’m a homosexual for it! Ah, the things we do for love.”

Richie’s heart soared. “I knew i—“

“Figure of speech, of course.”

Richie’s other organs tackled his heart and began beating it mercilessly.

“Right. Wait, how would this make me happy?”

“Well, you could hardly go half a minute without calling me ‘dearie’ or ‘honey’ and I thought that’s where our relationship was going!”

A brick with a note tied around it smashed through their window, but neither of them bothered to notice it.

“Eddie, first off, I have never called you ‘dearie’ in my life, and second off, you said you weren’t queer!”

Eddie stood up, knocking the chair over. “Alright, you absolutely bloody have, and just because I have it off with men doesn’t make me queer.” Richie’s blood fizzed as he tried to decide what to address first.

“When have I ever called you ‘dearie,’ you sodomite?” he sputtered.

“Every night, while you’re dragging my unconscious body around.”

“Damn,” Richie muttered. “Well, anyway, you,” he gagged slightly, “have it off with men?!”

“God, it sounds so prissy when you say it. Yes, I have it with men, but I’m not a transvestite or anything like you, y’ponce.”

Richie sputtered. “Historical records would point to the contrary, young man,” he protested, “not that I am one in the first place, I think you’re the only weirdo in this flat.”

Eddie picked up his hat, walked to the love-seat, punched Richie, and strode back to the door.

“Right, then,” Eddie said. “I’m off.” He left.

Richie stared at the space where he’d been for a few minutes before he remembered the brick. He absently unwrapped it as he began trying to figure out if he’d said something wrong.

The note read, “Kiss and make up, you goddamn queers, or keep it fucking down.”

Eddie didn’t come home that night, and only showed up around five in the morning, barely able to move more than one of his limbs at once. At the sound of a body slamming against the front door, Richie had jolted up from where he’d been resting his eyes at the kitchen table, dragged Eddie’s body upstairs, and went to bed himself.

Richie fell out of his dozing when Eddie fell down the stairs at eleven, but he stayed, staring at the ceiling, until the front door slammed shut at eleven twenty.

He found all the kitchen drawers on the floor, and most of the window cleaner gone. He dragged the ironing board from the corner, muttering half a sentence to himself now and then, and got on with heating up every scrap of fabric in the flat.

Eddie didn’t return for an hour, by which point Richie had been able to work himself into half a conspiracy theory and most of a violent outburst. The front door banged open.

“Young man, do you know what time it is?”

“No,” Eddie said. He dropped four sacks of something on the table. “Here’re your flours.” He wobbled to the couch and flicked open the newspaper.

Richie paused mid-towel and examined the sacks. “Eddie, this is flour.”

“What did I just say?”

“Shit,” whispered Richie. Then: “Eddie, why did you buy so much flour?”

“We ran out after you plastered the ceiling.”

Richie glanced at the crumbling, rat-bitten ceiling. “Yes, anyway.”

Eddie kept reading the paper.

“God, it’s quiet, isn’t it,” Richie burst out.

“Yeah, you can hear the sheets burning.”

“Shit!”

That evening, the pair had unleavened, inconsistently baked, wet flour for dinner. Richie stared at the table and conspicuously stole glaces at Eddie. Eddie watched a frozen rat fall from the ceiling.

“Rather cold in here, innit?”

“The window’s still broken,” Richie said deliberately. He quivered silently.

“What’s up your arse, then?”

“Nothing at all! Ever! And I’d like to keep it that way, thank you!” Richie startled as he realized what he’d said, then went through a range of expressions before settling on petulant.

“Coulda fooled me, dear,” Eddie said, suddenly staring straight at him. Richie squirmed under a conflict of his desires to assert his manhood and to get what he really wished he didn’t want, all catalyzed by Eddie glaring at him like a snapping turtle.

He settled for giving a nonchalant, “Well, that’s not terribly difficult, darling,” and slapping a hand over his mouth. A lopsided grin found its way over Eddie’s face.

“What was that, sweetheart?”

Richie would’ve prayed at that moment, if not for the fact that asking God for a little luck with a homosexual endeavor felt a mite counterproductive.

He glanced at Eddie, who was still grinning at him, and shifted coquettishly. “Just calling you an idiot… pumpkin,” Richie said.

Eddie made a face. “That’s hardly nice. ‘S just a vegetable.”

Richie thought as quickly as he could. “Well, ah, isn’t that you in a word, sugar, honey… saccharine. What are you looking for?”

Eddie stopped craning his head around. “Just trying to find where the moment went.”

Richie pulled a face and nodded at him sarcastically, then glared at the stains on the table. He won a few arguments in his head before he felt something on his leg.

“Christ, Eddie, the rats are really getting bold this winter.”

“That’s my foot, you git.” The thing on Richie’s leg shifted up and down.

“Ah. Ah ha, ha ha, so it is, hah,” wheezed Richie. He jabbered for a few moments more, then glanced furtively at Eddie, who was now watching him with no small amount of fondness. After Richie regained the power to think, he broke eye contact to grin stupidly at the table.

Eddie shifted his gaze and contentedly watched the activities of the rat colony. The pair sat in silence as the evening light rolled in from the broken window.

**Author's Note:**

> title from the cover by CAKE. another choice was "Paint" by Soul Coughing. 
> 
> when i started writing this fic the idea was "eddie starts calling richie 'darling' to fuck with him," but that idea kinda grew up and got a mortgage without me realizing. also, can you count the number of dick jokes I hid in the narration?


End file.
